Anthropic to Pay Nscale $45 Billion for AI Computing Power

Anthropic PBC has agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s flagship data center development in West Virginia, the latest move in an effort to secure capacity for its expanding business in advance of going public.

Nscale will use Nvidia Corp.’s Vera Rubin chips, which will start to come online late next year, to meet Anthropic’s needs, according to people familiar with the agreement. The commitment is over six years, and represents about 460 megawatts of power, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a private deal. That amount of electricity is enough for about 345,000 US homes at any one time.

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has emerged as one of the most significant customers for data center power. The company has inked several deals with computing providers in recent months — $50 billion with neocloud Fluidstack, $10 billion with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. and $45 billion with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Anthropic, which was valued at $965 billion in May, is expected to conduct a record-breaking initial public offering soon. It declined to comment.

Inking a tenant for the West Virginia data center is essential for London-based Nscale as it prepares for an initial public offering as soon as next month. The company has become one of the most prominent neoclouds — a cohort of companies such as CoreWeave Inc. that lease out AI-focused computing power.

The deal with Anthropic is for the first of three buildings at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia, which will total about 1.35 gigawatts when complete. Developing the full campus and on-site power plant will cost the company about $71 billion, according to planning documents. The largest chunk of that, $47 billion, comes from the AI chips. Servers at the other buildings will begin providing power in 2028, the people said.

The site was initially expected to be leased by Microsoft Corp., which had announced in March that it signed a letter of intent — a kind of reservation — for the planned data center. The firms also have worked together in Europe. But Microsoft walked away from the West Virginia site earlier in the summer, allowing Anthropic to become the tenant, the people said. Microsoft declined to comment.

Once operational, the full data center complex will directly employ about 645 people at the site and create about 3,600 more jobs across the state indirectly, according to the planning documents. Construction at the site will directly employ 4,375 people.

Nscale is also developing a large campus in Norway that will be used by Microsoft. Nscale has told prospective investors it has about $51 billion of total contracted revenue ahead of the listing, Bloomberg has reported. The company’s board includes former Meta Platforms Inc. executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg.